Long perceived as a relatively calm maritime corridor, the Red Sea has increasingly become a space marked by recurring crises, security incidents, and direct attacks, alongside the eruption of internal conflicts within several littoral states and rising tensions among them. Instability has spread across its surrounding geopolitical ecosystem, most notably in Yemen, the Horn of Africa, and Sudan.
Addressing Red Sea security today requires a broader concept and a renewed vision—one that neither dismisses the importance of military and security cooperation, which was notably absent from the original framing of the Red Sea Council announced in 2020, nor confines itself to a purely political approach or a narrowly defined military structure that was not envisaged at the time of the Council’s creation.
What is needed instead is the strengthening of the Red Sea’s geopolitical and security ecosystem—an approach that moves beyond excessive formality and protocol and focuses instead on substantive political, societal, and historical dimensions rooted in the shared heritage and long civilizational continuity of the region’s peoples and states.
The Red Sea has, in recent years, emerged as one of the world’s most unstable maritime corridors. It has been exposed to a wide range of security threats, beginning with the Al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden in October 2000, followed by the piracy crisis off the Somali coast that began in 2006, peaked in 2011, and resurfaced in 2022. These developments coincided with growing competition among major and regional powers over military bases in the southern Red Sea and around its strategic entrances, as well as the activities of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula within Yemen before and after 2011.
The instability deepened with the outbreak of the Yemeni-Yemeni armed conflict—particularly intense along the western coast—after the Houthis seized Sanaa in 2014, followed by the Arab coalition’s military intervention in 2015. It was further compounded by maritime attacks and indirect confrontation between Iran and Israel, the formation of international military coalitions operating under the banner of Red Sea security, including the US-led “Operation Prosperity Guardian” announced in December 2023 and the European Union’s naval mission “Aspides” launched in February 2024, as well as armed conflicts within Red Sea hinterland states such as Ethiopia and along its coastline, most notably in Sudan.
More recently, Houthi-Israeli hostilities and attacks on commercial shipping significantly reduced traffic through the Suez Canal. A January 2024 memorandum of understanding between Ethiopia and the breakaway region of Somaliland in Somalia granted Addis Ababa access to the sea and a military presence at the port of Berbera. The subsequent Israeli recognition of the self-declared “Republic of Somaliland” added a further destabilizing dimension, raising direct concerns over the balance of power and security in the Red Sea. All of this has unfolded at a time when Egypt and Saudi Arabia are pursuing massive development and investment projects closely tied to the stability of the Red Sea and central to their long-term national economic strategies.
Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, together with recent developments in Yemen following events in the Hadramout and Al-Mahra governorates, underscores the urgency of reaching a comprehensive security understanding. Such an understanding is required not only to protect the maritime corridor itself, but to stabilize the broader geopolitical and security ecosystem of the Red Sea as the essential foundation for sustainable maritime security. A careful reading of the region’s crisis-ridden trajectory over the past twenty-five years leads to a clear conclusion: there can be no lasting stability in the Red Sea without stabilizing its surrounding geopolitical ecosystem. This ecosystem encompasses the eight states that signed the charter of the Red Sea Council five years ago, in addition to the wider belt of countries in the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, and as far north as Libya.
External approaches to Red Sea security have largely been partial and inadequate. Most were driven by narrow security calculations and the interests of actors outside the region, designed to shield specific assets or trade routes rather than to establish genuine, comprehensive security for the Red Sea itself or for its littoral states as the true gateway to maritime stability.
The current moment, therefore, calls for an updated framework for the Red Sea Council. When the idea of the Council was first launched, member states did not envisage the creation of a military security structure, a point explicitly emphasized by the Saudi foreign minister at the signing of the charter in January 2020. That political framing reflected an outdated perception of the Red Sea as a relatively tranquil space. Today, however, the security environment has changed fundamentally, shaped in part by deliberate attempts to manufacture instability through the exploitation of internal conflicts and the fragmentation of vulnerable states, as seen in the actions of Israel and Ethiopia, among others.
A new vision for Red Sea security must therefore rest on several interconnected pillars. First, the political activation of the Council of Arab and African States Bordering the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden—comprising Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Sudan, Yemen, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti—has become an urgent necessity.
Five years after the charter was signed in Riyadh, the Council has yet to complete its institutional structure or take meaningful steps to address Red Sea security. Reviving its political framework is now indispensable, as further delay risks exposing member states to even greater strategic vulnerability.
Second, there is a growing need to develop a regional military-security framework that complements the Council’s political identity. Conditions today differ sharply from those of 2020, making it essential to build shared understandings on bilateral and collective military cooperation, coordinated responses to emerging threats, and expanded joint exercises capable of addressing evolving risks.
Third, investment in the Red Sea’s geopolitical and security ecosystem has become critical. This includes initiatives led by the region’s more stable and influential states to support countries suffering from armed conflict and deep economic distress. While Egypt and Saudi Arabia have already pursued mediation and stabilization efforts, what is required is a unified regional agenda capable of confronting actors that seek to undermine settlements and perpetuate conflict. Red Sea stability must be elevated to a top foreign-policy priority, pursued consistently across international forums with strategic patience, supported by early-warning mechanisms for emerging crises and parallel economic investments that deliver tangible benefits to local societies.
Finally, investment in the Red Sea’s intellectual and civilizational ecosystem remains an essential, though often overlooked, dimension of security. Sustainable political and security frameworks cannot succeed without conceptual alignment and cultural grounding. Dialogue among scholars, historians, experts, and policymakers can, over time, help articulate a shared Red Sea identity rooted in diversity and historical depth. Identities, after all, are not formed solely by lived history, but by how history is continually interpreted, transmitted, and embedded in collective consciousness.
Such an approach moves Red Sea security thinking beyond narrow external paradigms focused on immediate interests. It expands the vision of security to encompass dimensions absent from the Council’s original conception in 2020 and offers a far more effective response to destabilizing actions by regional and extra-regional actors than reliance on routine statements of condemnation.
* The writer is Editor-in-Chief of the Arab Strategic Report published by Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPSS)
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